This system is great. I felt empowered as I knocked these creeps down, grabbed their bats and slammed them back into the attackers. I'm sure it sounds like the process could get repetitive, but the crooks start using tasers and knives eventually, and that leads to you having to fight them in a different way and avoid simply mashing the strike button; you need to get behind the taser-packing guys to strike and daze the knife dudes before socking them in the jaw.

As you ping-pong off people with your savage attacks, a combo meter tallies your strikes on the left side of the screen. As long as each of your attacks is landing (Don't mash the buttons; pick your shots.) and you're not getting hit (Reverse, Master Bruce!), the combo count keeps climbing. I'm sure it sounds simple, but you'd be surprised how good you have to be to link together massive combos. If you can get the count up to eight (five with an upgrade), you can do special moves once you've unlocked them, and I can tell you that I don't do special moves all that often.

Still, whatever your largest combo is by the end of the fight, you're going to get a bonus in terms of XP. See, there's this little circle in the upper-left corner of the screen that is your XP gauge. Pulling off moves and besting challenges fills in the gauge, and when the two ends meet, you get to pick an upgrade for either Batman's suit for more health, moves for super-cool takedowns, Batarangs for power and such, or other weapons like your explosive gel.

You're also going to earn XP by taking out your opponents from the shadows. While there are going to be those times where Joker's men ambush you, there are also "Invisible Predator" moments. This is where you get the drop on a roomful of bad guys who are patrolling. These sections are cool because they forced me to play like Batman and not some random action game character. I'd shoot up to a gargoyle, kick on detective mode to see how many enemies I was up against, and then start picking them off one by one. If there was just one dude with a gun in the group, I'd glide in to take him out and then move to the other baddies. If there was more than one gunman, I'd stick to the shadows so as not to get my brains blown against the wall.

There's a lot of freedom on how you want to engage these bad guys, and it's one of the best parts of the game. You could wait for a guy to be alone and then glide kick in and perform a ground takedown, but you've got access to Batman's entire utility belt if you want. Once everything's unlocked, you can use explosive gel to blow out walls and knock guys out, you can through Sonic Batarangs that'll then explode, you can pull people over railings with the grappling hook, and you smash through windows to take guys out.

And all of that is just for starters. There's a line launcher, grates to pop out of, and gargoyles to hang bad guys from. Still, for me, the most satisfying part of these missions are the silent takedowns. This is where you crouch, come up behind an unsuspecting grunt, and choke the guy out. There are a few animations for these moves, and they're so quiet that even a bad guy just a few feet away from the attack can't hear it.

What do you fear?

While I enjoy the fact that the AI doesn't notice friends getting silently KO'd, there are plenty of times you'll plop down next to a goon or come right up on his peripheral vision and not be seen even though you would be in real life. Playing on Hard, which is available from the start, makes the AI a bit smarter, but I still could've gone for more attentive henchmen.

Still, Arkham excels despite any miniscule gripe I might have, and a big part of that draw is how much fun it is to explore this place. There are six main buildings on the island and each is cavernous. These places are filled with cells, laboratories, libraries, and more. Most of the interesting rooms are locked or blocked, so it's up to you to use your cryptographic sequencer to hack security panels or the gel to knock down walls and crawl through grates to get where you're going.

The driving motivation behind these quests will be the 240 Riddler challenges in the game. Every so often, the man in green chirps a riddle into Batman's earpiece that pertains to the room the Caped Crusader is in, and it'll be up to you to locate the answer and scan it with your analysis tool. Beyond those word problems, the Riddler's challenges include trophies he's tucked away in the asylum, visual puzzles you can only solve through Detective Mode, and more. It took me about nine hours to finish this game on the normal difficulty, but once I was done, I doubled back and spent another two or three hours polishing off Edward Nigma's challenges -- it was pretty awesome to walk around the empty buildings (there's no aftermath to play through so a completed save just picks up right before the final battle) and get to take in every poster, prop, and sight gag Rocksteady included as a nod to the comics.